I've been following with some interest the development of the list (of incidents of rape and sexual abuse taking place in comic books) that Ragnell and Kalinara have been working on, and today there was a link to a discussion of it at Newsarama.
One of the things people keep saying is that "the writer says it didn't happen." That someone asked the author of a story in question about the incident and, according to them, there was no intended sexual content (it was "just" torture, or whatever), and that that should settle the issue.
A few things come to mind. First is that comics have always had meaning other than just in the text. On a basic level, comics combine text and images, and the pictures aren't only there to illustrate the text--they don't just reiterate the text, they add to the meaning. If something looks like it is happening (or is about to happen) you can't assume that it isn't/hasn't just because there's no explicit reference to it in the text.
Second, comics have always (at least since the late 70s-early 80s, when comic companies seemed to start to recognize the existence of an audience older than preteen) included implied scenes. Pre-marital sex, for example, didn't officially take place in comics until relatively recently, but twenty-five years ago you did get scenes of Tony Stark waking up in a woman's apartment, or of Steve Rogers and Sharon Carter vacationing together--the implication was that there was something going on but it wasn't stated. (Comics Code, I suppose.) Does that mean that, because we never actually see Silver Age Tony Stark in bed with a woman, he kissed them all good night at the door and went back to the lab? Well, no. It's the equivalent of the cinematic fade to black.
Finally, meaning does not only reside in the author's intention. Sure, everyone who reads a given piece creates something of their own meaning, based on cultural expectations, personal experience, and so forth, and everyone will see something slightly different. That doesn't mean that each individual interpretation is equally valid; however, when a sizable number of readers get the same meaning from a piece (that Rogue was raped in a given scene, for example), regardless of what the author claims to have intended, the meaning that a large number of readers perceive is something to be considered, and to some degree you have to assume that at least the appearance of such a thing happening is likely to have been intentional. I do understand why an author might back off from a controversial interpretation--it's the same reason that these scenes are implied rather than stated outright. (I do think it's a little disingenuous for an author to claim "I'm shocked...shocked!" that anyone would make these assumptions, but as I said, it's understandable.) I also understand why some fans cling so tightly to these denials--same reason, other side.
Not to mention the gap between those who want their comics to reflect the real world and those who look to them for escape from it. The problem is that even when a book is intended as escapism, it's awfully hard to keep the real world out of it.
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